


Looking for Audrey

by SaltyCostumer



Series: Let Your Arrow Fly [7]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-08
Packaged: 2018-12-12 16:23:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,185
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11740740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltyCostumer/pseuds/SaltyCostumer
Summary: Starts just after Coulson's "death" and ends just after he returns from the dead.  Tony Stark tries to make things better, and things don't go as planned.





	Looking for Audrey

Tony Stark didn’t mean to cause any problems. 

Really, he didn’t. 

Tony never meant to cause problems. He tried to solve them. He was a problem solver. Sometimes, a problem came along that he couldn’t solve, and those were the problems that drove him nuts. Problems like Agent Coulson being dead. He’d liked Agent. Pepper had liked him. Pepper had even called him by his first name which, in violation of all logic and reason, she claimed was ‘Phil’. But Agent Coulson had been stabbed in the heart by Loki, and Tony didn’t have a way to fix that. What he could do was make all the things surrounding Agent Coulson’s death less difficult. He could pay for the funeral. Barton had done most of the planning, refusing offers of help with a quiet, “I’ve got this.” He could make sure that movers came and packed up Agent Coulson’s stuff and put in in storage until his family was ready to deal with it. He could fly Coulson’s sister and her family out for the funeral in his jet. He could set up a scholarship fund that would pay for his niece and nephew to go to school. He’d done the same thing for the other families who’d lost loved ones, but for Phil’s family he talked to the lawyer personally, wrote the check himself instead of just handing someone at the Stark Foundation a list of names and telling them to handle it. . And he could track down Audrey.

So when he’d called Agent’s sister, to finalize the arrangements for leasing out Phil’s now empty apartment, he’d asked if she knew how to get ahold of Audrey. She’d apologized and said she didn’t. That Phil had mentioned something about Audrey moving to Portland after a couple of seasons in Montreal, and she thought that they were on a break again. She’d sighed a little when she said that; said that she’d hoped that he and Audrey would have settled down, but they both put their careers first, and it was really too bad because Phil was so great with the kids, and she knew he’d have made a wonderful father and Tony awkwardly repeated that she’d be getting a quarterly check from the property management company and hung up, ending the call before both of them started crying.

A shot of bourbon later, he’d called SHIELD and spoke to a very nice Agent who said that she was very sorry, but that Agent Coulson hadn’t put anything in his file about how to contact Audrey. 

So he told Friday to hunt for Audrey on the internet. Friday had come back with a Facebook page, an Amazon Prime account, an email address, all the usual detritus of life in the age of information, except for a phone number. It made sense that she’d keep that private. Pretty lady cellists probably had to worry about obsessive fans, and dudes with white half-masks kidnapping them or whatever. So he’d contacted her using all the means he had, and Audrey hadn’t responded. At the time he’d been dealing with rebuilding Stark Tower and cleaning up the mess he’d made and maybe she wanted to mourn in private. Besides, he’d needed to work on the armor and-

And then he’d found himself in Oregon, and some impulse had made him decide to go to the symphony after a long day of dealing with very boring people, and he’d found himself looking at the string section, wondering which one of the cellists was Audrey. He could at least talk to her, pay his respects. One of the advantages of being Tony Stark was that he could talk his way backstage at almost any venue. This place was no exception, and he found himself chatting with a very attractive blonde violinist who had absolutely no idea who Audrey was. Neither did anyone else he asked, and although the Portland classical music scene wasn’t tiny, it wasn’t so large that someone wouldn’t have met Audrey. This struck him as odd, and Tony Stark didn’t like things that were odd. Odd things made his teeth itch. 

To stop his teeth from itching, once he got back to New York, Tony called in his Chief of Security and told him to come back when he had tracked down the elusive Audrey. Two weeks later, the man was in his office with a thick file, and a story that made Tony’s teeth start itching again. “Mr. Stark,” the Chief said, opening the file, “I don’t know what to tell you. This cellist, Audrey, she doesn’t exist. She hasn’t ever existed, but God damn me if I don’t half expect to see her walking through that door, asking why I’ve been combing through her life. Whoever made this trail - I’d like to shake their hand, because that person is an artist. She’s got everything, and it goes back for years. Over a decade. Job history, credit score - you name it. The only way I could poke holes in the story was to have someone go and pull the actual paper programs for the concerts that she didn’t play in. Because the ones on the websites? The old ones list her. I don’t know who set this up, but unless you have a good reason for me to keep digging, I’m going to stop, because whoever set this up has to belong to some kind of alphabet soup agency, and that I don’t want to start screwing with for no good reason.” Tony had nodded, thanked the nice man for his hard work, and promised to leave it alone. Once Chief had left, Tony asked Friday to send the nice man a bonus and then sat, reading through the file and wondering why Agent Coulson had put so much effort into creating a fictional woman.

Clearly, he was hiding something. But Agent Coulson was always hiding something. He was a agent; Hiding things was what they did. Maybe Audrey was some sort of experiment, a test for other SHIELD agents. No, that sounded wrong. Because even Agent Coulson wasn’t sufficiently obsessed with paperwork to create a fictional woman just for the sake of his own amusement. He was hiding something. Not knowing what made Tony chafe, but he realized that it was very possible that the only person who could offer an explanation was Agent, and he was dead. And maybe, just maybe, the dead were entitled to a few secrets, even if those secrets caused Tony Stark to be annoyed.

Then of course, a month or so after Tony Stark had heroically decided to not keep digging into the Mystery of the Non-Existent Cellist, out of respect for the dead; it was revealed that Agent wasn’t nearly as dead as Nick Fury had said. Which meant that the mystery was something that he could maybe, eventually get the answer to.

Not that he thought about all of the time. Tony was a busy man, with lots of things to keep his brain busy. Even so, the question of why Agent Coulson had gone to so much trouble to create a paper trail bugged him. He picked at it, like a scab. The most obvious explanation was that Agent Coulson was using a fake relationship to cover for a real one, but the only relationship anyone had ever heard him talk about was the non-existent cellist. Coulson didn’t vanish from the city often enough to have a family stashed somewhere in the boonies. A casual thing, or even a series of casual things wouldn’t be worth an extensive cover up. Not unless Agent Coulson was a very, very naughty boy.

Which no, just no. The thought of Agent Coulson in a gimp suit required a gallon of brain bleach. Was brain bleach really a thing? If it wasn’t, maybe he should fix that. But no. Coulson didn’t have that tightly wound, repressed thing that would suggest that he was repressing some deep, dark secret. The man was too healthy and well adjusted to be suppressing something, which meant that what he was hiding wasn’t a what. It had to be a who. Which raised the next question: Who was the who that he was hiding? He’d asked around SHIELD, which had lead him to finding out about the existence of The Book. Surprisingly, there were very few bets about who Agent Coulson was involved with. Most of them centered on his orientation, other than a cluster of bets that he was secretly married to Fury’s sister, with a small cluster of people cutting out the sibling, and speculating that he was secretly involved with Fury. Tony had already disregarded the idea of a secret family, and since he’d actually met Fury’s wife, he knew that rumor could be discarded as well. She didn’t strike him as the sort of woman who would put up with her husband having a side piece. So he’d laughed, tossed a few hundred bucks at the more amusing rumors, and decided that SHIELD was not the place to look for the solution to his problem. Which was disappointing, because what was the point of having an entire organization loaded with spies if all of them were so terrible at spying?

But the part about Fury got him to thinking. What if the reason for keeping everything double top secret was because Coulson was involved with someone in SHIELD? Granted, SHIELD didn’t outright forbid relationships between agents, but they did take a dim view of relationships that involved an agent and the people they were supervising. Which, given that Coulson’s job seemed to be “guy who goes in and deals with whatever is giving Fury a headache this week,” meant pretty much everyone in SHIELD, with the exception of Fury. 

So, someone in SHIELD. Now, he just needed more data. Which was why he had Friday; to look for patterns in data. Even though she hadn’t sounded thrilled when he said, “I don’t know. A pattern. If I knew, I wouldn’t be telling you to look.” A day later, she’d come back with a list of things related to Agent Coulson that overlapped with people in SHIELD. Some of them could be safely discarded - having an obsession with Captain America and/or the Howling Commandos and/or Peggy Carter was more or less a job requirement for SHIELD agents. There were other similarities in background that could be ignored. Along with tastes in food, weapons and other things. And choice of vacation spots. A lot of SHIELD agents liked to go camping, and it looked like Coulson was pretty typical in that, for the past five years, just about half the time he got more than a couple days of leave, he went camping. No, that wasn’t right. It was exactly every other time. No other agent could possibly be so predictable, but that was Coulson to a T. Tony was just about to discard vacations as a possible clue, when he said it aloud, “No other agent could be as predictable as Coulson.” That was, apparently, Friday’s cue to ask for clarification and when he explained Friday replied, “Agent Barton goes camping every other leave as well.” Tony looked, and yes, Friday was right. Not only that, but the trips alternated. Coulson would be a city mouse and Barton - ”Friday, pull up a map. Plot Coulson and Barton’s vacations. Mark the temporal and physical location.” Bingo. There it was. Every time they got a long leave, and their leaves always overlapped, always one of them would go to a campground, and the other one would go to a city or town that was, “Never more than a four hour drive away.” Tony said, grinning as he put together the puzzle. “Friday, when did this pattern start?” he asked. The answer came back, and it surprised him. Seven years. 

That wasn’t a casual fling. That was a relationship. That might be, no probably was, love. And Tony Stark believed in love. And he believed in solving problems. And the solution was obvious. He’d offer it up, as soon as Hawkeye and Agent got back from their current trip. Coulson had gone to Albuquerque, for the Balloon Festival, and Barton was in Colorado, camping. Roughly four hours away.

So they came back, and he greeted Agent Coulson with a friendly smile, “Hey Agent. How was the trip? Listen, the next time you and Hawkeye need some couple time just let me know. I’m pretty sure I’ve got a few beach houses somewhere. You guys could stay at one of them.”

The look that Coulson gave him could have cut glass, or frozen a forest fire, “What are you talking about, Stark? Agent Barton and I work together, and we’re friends, but we don’t need ‘couple time’. I don’t know what you’re insinuating. Please, excuse me. I was looking for Agent Barton. I need to talk about a report with him.”

And then he’d left, leaving Tony wondering what he’d done wrong. And why, over the next few weeks, Barton kept throwing things at him.


End file.
